music

Remember a few months ago when my creative non-fiction piece ‘Sarajevo Roses‘ was published in The Puritan? The good peeps there asked me to contribute to their Town Crier section on the topic of music and what I like to listen to when I write. People ask me all the time what music is good for surging their creativity when they write. Here’s what I listen to. Maybe you’ll discover some new tunes that will inspire your writing. Click here or click the image above to read.

The essence of drama is conflict. I had a lot of both in the past few years, but 2015 was oddly light and serene. I hustled my ass off, pulled every string, worked and LIVED, and received very little flack from the universe. 2015 was THE YEAR.

I started the year in New York City where I was housesitting. On a chance invite from a friend, I attended a Moth Storytelling event. I had been listening to the Moth podcast for years, and this was a story-slam event, meaning I could put my name in a hat and possibly be called up on stage. I threw my hat in the ring, decided what I would say while I was waiting in line to get into the venue, and wouldn’t you know it….

SPOKEN WORD

Live Storytelling and Spoken Word means a lot to me and I continued to do it back home in Toronto at Raconteurs:

Storytelling is an extension of writing to me. It feeds my need to tell stories and also to be a ham. I also discovered that working out ideas on stage proved excellent for cultivating written story ideas. 2015 was also the year of–

Chris Writes All The Things

Editors this year were like, “Hey Chris, do you want to publish stuff? HERE, HAVE ALL THE PUBLICATIONS YOU LIKE.”

It was like payback for many years of only publishing maybe one or two pieces every 6 months.

Of course, this wasn’t by fluke. I busted my ass, I submitted and submitted and submitted, and got rejection after rejection, but my acceptance rate kind of skyrocketed this year. I actually found myself in the odd position SEVERAL TIMES this year where I had to reject one publication because another had already bought my piece. I was selling pieces so quick, in some instances, I had to turn people down! I ALMOST sent them the lame boilerplate rejections they had sent me for years, but nahhhhhhh.

SELLING STORIES

The first piece I sold this year was actually an academic essay which I sold to Palaver Journal based out of a southern University. I finished my Masters Degree ten years ago, but I can still flex my chops when I need to.

Then I sold a short story to GRAIN when they wanted to buy another story of mine, but I had to turn them down because another journal had already bought it, so they asked for anything else I had, and snapped up this piece right away!

And then I cold-pitched METRO News Canada and they printed my piece in the centrefold:

And just a couple weeks ago, another one of my serious essays about sexual harassment and the experience of reporting it to the police was published by my old friends at AufBau:

And this isn’t even all of my publications! Just a cross-section! I also sold three more stories whose publication dates are imminent, like TOUTE SUITE, dropping in a few weeks soon! So expect to read more from me in the new year!

Speaking of HouseSitting

This year, I did back…

…to back

…to back

…to back

…to back

…to back housesitting gigs.

These pictures aren’t even all of them. In total in 2015 I did ELEVEN housesits in 12 months. Considering that 4 of them lasted more than a month, and one of them lasted almost 3 months, that’s a lot of housesitting with snugglecats and dogs and not having to pay rent.

Last name Win, first name Epic.

And it’s not over yet. I’ve been housesitting for years and years now, so why stop in 2016. Starting in January, I will be housesitting in VIENNA!!

I haven’t been to Vienna since that first European clusterfuck trip in 2005 (here are some posts about that trip…. gosh this blog is old). I was last in Austria in 2012 for my Eurail Extravaganza, but I missed out on Vienna, so I’m super excited to spend a lot of time there this Winter.

I want to to everything Viennese, like eating strudel served by Michael Haneke on a harpsichord.

I’ll also be swinging through London, Prague, and Amsterdam, so the great tapestry of adventures I’m trying to build can continue!

Hey, You Never Know

One of my main mantra’s of 2015 was “Ask and you shall receive.” In the past I’ve refrained from asking for what I wanted because I assumed the answer would be no, or, more likely, I felt pretentious for even asking. Like, who the fuck are you Christine? You got some balls asking for that. That changed this year, when I realized that the worst thing that could happen was they’d say No. And if that’s the worst-case-scenario, it’s pretty surmountable. So with that in mind, I figured no-guts-no-glory. I’m a writer, so my income is limited (obvi). The amount of funds I can allocate to quality of life (movies, music, theatre, concerts, performances, dance, festivals, etc) is extremely limited. So what did I do when I wanted to go to an event but couldn’t afford it?

I asked for free tickets.

And I got them.

BOOM.

This year, just because I asked, I gained free entry to the following:

If It Ain’t Broke…

Everyone knows I’m a huge flea market person (and this year I joined the super secret but now highly coveted collective of BUNZ Trading) so this year I procured a lot of fantastic antiques at bargain prices, and sometimes, for a few tokens or a bottle of wine.

I already had a typewriter, but I still went ahead and got myself a second one. Because reasons.My two bee-yoots, side-by-side

And then I got a rotary phone. It’s a necessity in the modern world.

And then I finally hooked up speakers to my record player, so I went on a vinyl-buying binge, and got some gems like Duke Ellington (click the little volume button in the bottom right of the vid to listen!):

and the master Django Reinhard!

With these new gadgets, I am now able to open a sassy new office… in 1979.

Speaking of Music

I went to some kick-ass concerts this year. In years past I had grown a bit tiresome of concerts (I had been a music critic for about 5 years and now I have a touch of tinnitus…) but, I guess… YOLO

And the Oscar Goes To…

I saw a lot of films this year, and even reviewed some during TIFF for VICE. Here are the ones that haunted me long after the credits rolled:

-VICTORIA

-The Daughter

-Son of Saul

-Homesick

-CitizenFour

-Disorder/Maryland

As you can see from this list, I am not really a mainstream/Hollywood/wide-release film person. I prefer indie cinema, the ones that make the festival circuit. They usually have no money behind them and therefore can take more risks or tell stories we don’t normally see. So you can take your Chris Nolan/JJ Abrahms/Michael Bay clusterfuck and order it on DVD. Yawn.

Get Busy Livin’

As I said, I started the year in New York (housesitting). I also traveled to my hometown of Montreal (housesitting), and just recently I went to Miami (housesitting). But I really wanted to exercise my passport, so I bounced down to Mexico, Guatemala and Belize for a Mayan Adventure!

I made a short film about my experiences, I figured it was more fun than posting a bunch of touristy photos. I call it GET RICH OR DIE MAYAN. Enjoy!

My beloved Berlin pianist Nils Frahm played a sold-out show in Toronto a few days ago, and I was lucky enough not only to grab a ticket, but after the first song Says, he invited us to sit on the stage with him, so I was literally sitting at his feet as he played, a mere metre away. This is the fifth time I’ve seen him live in just over a year, previously I’d seen him in Cologne, twice in Copenhagen, and also Berlin. When you watch him live, you become entranced by his fingers and his arm muscles which seem to be moving faster than your eyes or your camera lens can see. Notice in the pic above how my camera can’t even keep up with his hands. He plays three pianos at once and pulls this amazing orgasm face when he gets really into it.

You heard me.

Anyway, after the show, I told him it was my fifth time seeing him, and he was like, whaaaaaaaaaaaat? I told him I even saw him in that play he did in Copenhagen earlier this year. And he was like, you’re here now? I said I just returned a month ago, and he was like, you never said hello after the other shows! He was delightful and I was a total fan girl. He’s adorbs and I want to fold him up and take him with me everywhere in my pocket…. or something.

The wonderful people over at FUSAC treated me to the best New Years Eve gift I could have received: tickets to see The Artist Live in Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra! I had never been to the RAH and I have always dreamed of seeing the LSO perform live, ever since I was a second-chair Viola in my high school’s symphony orchestra, so this was a thrilling delight. I have already seen The Artist, so I didn’t pay too much attention to the film. I kept staring the the Cellos (celli?) and the xylophones and the tubas and the Double Basses …. I just love watching hands in vibrato in unison. Even the way they plucked pizzicato was glorious. Above is a super short clip of them warming up (no photos allowed during the performance, naturally).

Royal Albert Hall is a huge concert venue, with several tiers, balconies, and ornate architecture, it was a feast for the eyes. Somehow, FUSAC got me seats in the 14th row on the mezzanine floor! Best seats in the house! I looked up how much tickets were, and was shocked at the prices. I love getting sweet cultural experiences for free!

As the orchestra took a bow, the composer of the film, who was actually there, Ludovic Bource, joined the conductor Ernst Van Tiel for an encore. It was the most memorable New Years I’ve had in years.

So 2014, eh? In a few months, this blog will be nine years old. I’m tenacious, if nothing else.

I’m not one for Resolutions or for End-of-year lists or Best-of’s. I have a lot to reflect on, but so much more to come my way.

All I’ll contribute to the reflective dialogue of the changing of the calender year is this:

Say what you will about me, but in my life, I have had every opportunity to be boring, and I never took it.

Like this:

A testament to how strange and wonderfully sync’d life can be sometimes:

Remember last month when I asked if anyone could put me in touch with the band A Winged Victory For The Sullen? (Read that blog post here). Well, as these pictures can attest to, currently playing an aria on my piano is none other than Sir Adam Wiltzie ofA Winged Victory For The Sullen.

The band makes house calls!

We exchanged music for a dip in the pool. Hence the reason he’s shirtless and in swimming trunks.

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Among many of my things to-do whilst in New York, one of them was The Madonna Tour of New York. This isn’t something that is organized and run by official tour guides. This is something I fashioned myself using Google. I’ve always been really inspired by Madonna’s life. Her music, I can take it or leave it, but I find her struggle for success really inspiring. Unlike most celebrities today who are famous through nepotism or for nefarious acts, Madonna made her own life. She arrived in New York with no money, knowing next to no one, and was even sexually assaulted. She squatted in buildings and barely scraped by for 5 years in New York, until she finally got that record deal in the early 1980s. So I’m not particularly interested in the Madonna of now, more of the Madonna from the late 70s. Every year or so, I reread Andrew Morton’s biography about her (which I bought 10 years ago in a second-hand bookstore for $3) and it really gives me a kick in the pants to do more with my life. To be more ambitious and driven.

Anyway, Morton’s book is so detailed about the places and people in her life in the late 70s that I realized I could actually (probably) find these places and meet these people whilst there. So after scouring the book once more for precise details, I set about fashioning my own Madonna tour of New York… one that visited most of the places that were a part of her tapestry. I also contacted one very important person from her life at that time (more on that later…)

First stop, the synagogue in Queens.

In the late 70s, Madonna met the Gilroy brothers, Dan and Ed. They were musicians in a band and she was still a dancer at this point. She began a relationship with Dan and promptly moved in with him and Ed. Dan and Ed at the time were living in this above synagogue deep in the heart of Corona, Queens.

You can tell just by looking at it’s size and architecture that it was built sometime in the early 1900s and was converted into a house probably in the 1960s after falling into disrepair and disuse by the Jewish community.

Ed Gilroy and his wife still live in this synagogue actually, but weren’t there when I visited, so I left a lil’ hello note in their mailbox. When Andrew Morton visited this synagogue, Ed took him down to the basement where 30 years prior, Dan had taught Madonna how to play the drums. She had been a drummer in their band The Breakfast Club before becoming the guitarist…. and finally wanting to take the front position. Also, in the basement, are reel-to-reel recordings they made back then of Madonna singing and playing, of her chatting with Dan and Ed playfully …. it’s like a time machine back to the 70s and of her unfamous life, Morton wrote.

Standing here, I was imagining a young black-haired skinny Madonna, younger than I am now, bounding down these steps and heading for the subway to go into Manhattan, taking the exact same steps I had taken to get there by subway….. it was a pretty connecting and exciting thought.

Next stop …. The Russian Tea Room in Manhattan

When Madonna first arrived in New York in the late 70s and was still a dancer, her dancing instructor (Pearl Lang) worried about how thin she was and how she was getting by, so she got Madonna a job at The Russian Tea Room on 57th. Now from all the sources I have read, she was a “hat check” girl there in the late 70s before getting fired. But I walked inside the TRTR and asked the hostess, and she said Madonna was a “coat check” girl in the early 80s. So I’m not sure which is correct, but either way, the hostess confirmed that yes, Madonna worked there.

Next stop …. The Music Building on the shitty west side.

The Music Building is an infamous shitty building on 8th avenue in the shitty “Minnesota Strip” part of Manhattan that, in the early 80s, must have been 100x worse. Drugs, violence, crime, and then this towering inferno, floor after floor, of disgusting sweaty, smelly wannabe rock n’ roll superstars jamming all hours into the night, spilling out into the street.

This is also where Madonna recorded her first demos and met her first manager, Camille Barbone.

Madonna used to actually squat illegally in the music building and wash herself in the ladies loo. Fab Five Freddy once said that when he met Madonna, she smelled so bad and it seemed like she was the type to get around, hahaha. Anyway, I tried to go inside but the doors were locked (you need a fob key to get in) and I didn’t have an appointment (which you also need if you want to look around).

But I looked up and knew that inside one of those windows was the studio where Madonna and Steven Bray put the finishing touches on Everybody…

Next stop, 30 West 21st street, which now is a very gentrified and beautiful area, but 30 years ago it was …

…where Danceteria used to be. Danceteria was the club where Madonna passed her demo tape to Mark Kamins (the DJ there, and sometime A & R rep, who briefly became her boyfriend) who then passed it on to Seymour Stein, head of Sire Records, who was laid up in the hospital after heart surgery and told Kamins to bring Madonna to him in the ward. Danceteria is also where Madonna had her first live performance of Everybody, and where she recorded her very first music video (Everybody).

Next two stops were the former locations of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s, where Madonna and her early band Emmy played some of their first gigs. Emmy was actually Madonna’s nickname when she was younger so the band adopted it as their name. I have found some of Emmy’s recordings online, and I think my favourite is “Little Boy Lost.” It’s very punk-influenced and Madonna’s voice is so pure in it. She strains to hit some notes, but that’s what I love about it, she’s putting so much heart into it. Now they’d auto-tune out all her strain, which really is a sad thing. On “Little Boy Lost” you get to hear her voice unfiltered by subsequent technique and lessons. She had a lovely voice then, now it kind of sucks. When the critics in the 80s called her voice like “Minnie Mouse on helium” I think that really struck a chord with her and she has since tried to lower her octave (listen how deep she goes on “Papa Don’t Preach.”). But I kind of miss her spritely, natural voice.

CBGBs only officially closed in 2006…. and I made my first ever NYC visit in 2007 so I missed it completely, but luckily the dude who took over the space and turned it into a shop kept most of the memorabillia around.

The walls were never painted over. This wall and space was almost right behind the former bar.

Now, as promised, here’s the story of the person I contacted …..

Through a lot of online digging and sleuthing, I found the mailing address of Dan Gilroy, Madonna’s former boyfriend (mentioned above in the synagogue section), and also the man who taught her how to play the drums and guitar…. and basically how to make music.

So I wrote him a hand-written letter a few weeks before I arrived in NYC, basically asking him if he would be okay meeting up with me for a cuppa and a chat.

I figured that by the time he got my snail-mail letter, I’d already be in NYC, so I gave him my email address as a reply method, and kept my fingers crossed.

Whilst in NYC, I received an email from him! He said he was now living in Texas (my letter had been forwarded to him there, so the mailing address I had found was technically wrong) so we couldn’t meet. I won’t include all of his letter here, for privacy reasons of course, but here are some select lines:

“… i enjoyed your letter. you’re a smart and upbeat writer. smarts and upbeatedness don’t get together all that often. ….

i really don’t get asked much about way back when (ed’s note, he means his time with madonna); i don’t mind when i am but unless something like the r&r hall of fame induction happens, where she made a nice personal reference to back then ( ed’s note: when she was inducted in the rock and roll hall of fame, she thanked him and ed gilroy), or the super bowl show and all the fanfare and attendant curiosity, it’s fairly here and now around here...

…I’m guessing i don’t have to tell you to have a great and fun trip. keep that writing thing happening, Christine -dan “

He’s so kind!!! His letter was so generous and giving, he didn’t even have to write me back at all, so I was so grateful for his response. If that man wasn’t like 60 years old, I’d be all up in his grill.

So there you have it, that was my own personal Madonna tour of New York.

I would highly recommend it:)

Madonna once said that what you do in life, and how far you go, depends on how hungry you are.

those lyrics were sung in Marlene Dietrich’s “The Blue Angel” movie, and again, roughly translate to “from head to feet, i am made to love him.” (although the song was later recorded in English by The Beatles as “Falling in Love Again.”)

i am a huge fan of music and movies from the 1930s (It Happened One Night=fav movie ever!) yet i love graffiti …. turns out i’m not alone.

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i’ve been bed-ridden for the past 4 days with a virus that is slow to depart, but i am on the mend (there were some scary moments though, i must admit)…. but a few days before i was a sick weakling with atrophied legs, i went to the Arctic Monkeys/Black Keys concert at the Air Canada Centre. i was lucky enough to get in on the pre-sale for this back in december, and quickly snagged a ticket before it sold out.

frankly, i was more excited for Arctic Monkeys than Black Keys (been a fan of theirs for five years, only been into the keys for two years).

i really am kicking myself for not going to an Arctic Monkeys concert whilst I lived in England, that would have been much better.

normally, i’m not a fan of arena shows. i prefer smaller venues. as you can tell, even though my seats were pretty great, i was still really far from my love Alex Turner….

oh alex…. now that you and alexa chung have broken up, please, can i have your abortion?

there were some people sitting around me who didn’t even know who the Arctic Monkeys were …. i was like WHAT.

they played all my fav tunes… Brianstorm, Crying Lightning, I Bet that You Look Good on the Dancefloor, Fluorescent Adolescent, Leave Before The Lights Come On, Don’t Sit Down Cuz I’ve Moved Your Chair…. but they didn’t play A Certain Romance, Fake Tales of San Francisco, or anything from the Submarine soundtrack. NEXT TIME, i’m going to a concert where they’re headlining, cuz they left me aching for more. stupid opening act slot does not do them justice

and then the keys took the stage

since there’s only two of them, they made sure their set was loaded with spectacle. flashy lights, disco balls, huge video screens, lotsa hullabaloo

they played all my favourites, Gold on the Ceiling, Lonely Boy, Tighten Up, Howlin’ For You, Next Girl… but they didn’t play Have Love Will Travel. WTF?

This is a band that I don’t think necessarily translates well into huge arenas. They can sell out the arenas, for sure, but their music is so intimate and so CBGBs that it feels like a crime to be seated a football field away from the stage….

i made a short video of their encore…. a disco ball dropped from the ceiling, illuminating the entire audience in an ambient light. that reverberation you hear isn’t the drums, it’s the entire ACC audience clapping in time. it was a great moment:) Enjoy!

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i’m walking along gerard street east … and i mean EAST, like way out there in the east end near Pape, when something in the window of a convenience store catches my eye…. do you see it?

fuck. me. hard.

that clearly doesn’t belong there, someone slipped it into the shop window without the owners noticing! this is WICKED AWESOME, and like most street art, you have to know what it’s referencing to get the joke.

in case that went right over your head, watch this video:

Ungh. so many greased-up butterfaces looking like they just escaped from a ukranian brothel.

only thing is, in the stencil she’s drilling a safe…. but in the video, she’s not. is this the artist’s way of saying this place should be robbed?

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Christine Estima

Christine Estima

As a half-Portuguese, half-Lebanese, feminist, novelist, hipster, atheist, charlatan, blogger, backpacker, playwright, bookworm, film critic, bon vivant and lovertine, I began my journey of petulance and precociousness in the suburbs of Montreal and Toronto. I thusly figured I'd turn out to be a nun, or a writer. A few years at a Catholic school cured me of the first disease.

I cannot wear white without spilling something on it, but you'll still find me, most likely, in the fridge at 4am.

I mean well.

Want to know more about me? You can find my bio, writing portfolio, and media coverage at ChristineEstima.com